Gus and Ross come to visit!

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After landing back in Yangzhou from our travels up north in Ha’erbin, we took the next three hours to do two loads of laundry, go for a run, unload most cold-weather gear, load up a sack-full of warm-weather clothing, and check e-mail before hopping back on a bus headed for Shanghai where we would meet Kelly’s dad and brother, Angus and Ross. We met them at the airport with milk-tea in hand (a popular Chinese concoction of milk, tea, a bit of sugar, and plus-sized marbles of tapioca, all slurped up with a extra-wide straw about a half-inch in diameter) before taking the mag-lev train from Shanghai Pudong Airport. The train rocketed us some 30 km into the middle of Shanghai at an easy 430 km/hr (268.75 m/h), and after Angus and Ross’s 25+ hours of travel, we finally sat down to enjoy a large bowl-full of noodles, stir-fry and dumplings.

Tromping around Shanghai

Come June, Shanghai plans on rolling out a China-sized red carpet displaying every ounce of its hard-earned wealth and power while welcoming the rest of the world to visit during the World Expo 2010. Everywhere we looked we saw clear evidence of a big dance about to happen. Many famous landmarks like The Bund sat completely ripped apart as workers bustled, around the clock, in effort to finish the city-wide face lift due for early summer. Thanks to all the general maladies caused by mass-construction at an historically unprecedented scale (according to World Expo 2010, 17%!o(MISSING)f the worlds’ active tower cranes are in service within the greater Shanghai metropolitan area), no single surface within a 200 mile radius of this ‘Paris of the East’ sat immune to the thin film of progress-inspired gray dust. Tree leaves, park benches, sides of buildings, floors, walls, roofs, windows; anything left untouched or unwashed for more than a day or two possessed a gentle wash of grime not seen since the western Industrial Revolution.
Adding to the effort in proving progress for a bigger, better, more civilized city, many street intersections, regardless of the presence of street lights and walk signals, now have four uniformed monitors (one to each corner) vigorously guarding the corners from early morning until late night; completely bent on curing the J-walking bug so infectious in the over-crowded streets of China. Many of the streets, including small alleyways have also received a face-lift and sport nice, clean-ish new blacktop, new street paint, and new feau-stone curbs.

The icon for Expo 2010, a little blue guy named, Hai bao or 海豹, looks like a combination of Gumby, Sponge-Bob Square-Pants, and a squeeze of blue toothpaste. His skinny arms wave with an open four-fingered hand and his fuzzy blue face exhibits an inviting smile - he sat for sale, in any size you like, on nearly every street corner, bus stop, subway station, and alleyway. As we later found out via Expo 2010 homepage, the blue color of the little man “shows latitude and imagination, which represents the rising and potential of China.” His round body “represents a well-off life, which is also lovely and cute” and his big round eyes “show his anticipation of the city.” His body shape borrowed inspiration from the ren character, 人, means “people” and suggests that “the World should be supported by ‘people,’ and people should have harmonious relationships with nature and society, so that the life in cities would be better.” A bit ironic, I think, for a city pushing 20+ million people and one of the worst pollution problems in the world … but who’s to be critical these days?

On our first morning out, because of the awesome jet-lag thanks to a thirteen-hour time jump, we (as in they) woke up extra early for a breakfast of pork and vegetable dumplings before and rolled out of the hostel for a visit to the Yu Gardens. For the travelers good at waking up early, we came to the conclusion that any place, no matter how busy, will follow a general 80/20 rule; 80%!o(MISSING)f the tourists will visit a popular site during 20%!o(MISSING)f the operating hours. In our case, we arrived to an almost empty garden and explored in an eerie bliss of solitude while the rest of Shanghai was busy hitting the snooze button. The Yu Gardens, called Yu Yuan, 豫园, or “enthusiasm park,” have a complex design based on six separate small gardens encompassing some five acres and are tied together with multiple pools, walls, gateways and pagodas, intended to make the small park seem like an eternity of beautiful scenes. Originally finished in 1529, says Wikipedia, the park required an initial investment of time and labor by a man named Pan Yunduan, who over the course of twenty years constructed the gardens with the ultimate goal, we’ve read, of pleasing his father; a high-up official in the Ming dynasty.

After visiting the gardens we spent the next two full days absorbing everything Shanghai had to offer. We spent the majority of our time rolling around Shanghai on foot, ambling through the Old Town district and the French Concession, the Bund, Nanjing Street (Shanghai’s equivalent of 5th Ave) and the People’s Park. We ate street food, peking duck, hot pot, XinJiang pulled noodles, dumplings, pot stickers, and everything in-between. Not too far from the truth, I feel competent in reporting that only a very few select moments in Shanghai were actually spent hungry.

We have all been to those late fall football games or early spring track meets where we think, “Oh, its not that cold… I’ll be just fine, I won’t need a jacket…” and then proceed to shiver for the duration of the affair. This ill-fated athletics event lasted a solid eight days and both Ross and Angus had not yet built up their thick hides for the chill - a give-or-take 40 degrees with high humidity; easy in comparison to a “tough” Montana-Iowa winter but most definitely bone-chilling if one spends the entire day outside. More than once we made stops at our old friend McDonalds for a cup of coffee and warm surroundings. Towards the end of our travels together, Angus earned himself the nickname Marshmallow-Man as he strolled around wearing an over-sized down vest beneath an under-sized rain jacket. Shénme shuài ge - How handsome.

Li River Valley—

On the morning of Ross and Angus’s third day in China we whisked ourselves to the domestic airport servicing Shanghai - Shanghai HongCiao Airport - and flew to Guilin. Karst mountains dominate the landscape surrounding Guilin and its neighboring Yongshou; stump-like pieces of limestone left from multiple millennia of erosion. A slow process of erosion first formed mammoth caves which then eroded to the point of the cave ceilings ultimate collapse, leaving behind only steep vertical walls, jungle-like vegetation, and fresh air. Loads of fresh air. Everywhere we looked, the landscape, the water, the air… seemed to become more and more magical as we toured our surroundings via taxi, bicycle, boat, bus, modified motorcycle, and of course, foot.

While in Guilin we spent one day traveling into the mountains to visit the Longji Titian or the Dragon’s Backbone Terraces, a marvelous display of human ingenuity and back-breaking labor slowly carving a living from steep hillsides. Dragon’s Backbone is home to two ethnic minorities, the Zhuang and the Yao, both of which treat Mandarin Chinese as a second language. An especially remarkable characteristic of the Yao women is their special treatment of their hair - only cut three times in a lifetime. The culture celebrates hair in ways far more intense than any western crowd… they keep hair from their ancestors, gather shed hair when brushing, and before going out for the day, pile it all into one huge roll around their heads. The unmarried women wear a shawl around their hair, waiting for the special day to reveal their hair to a new husband. The childless married women wrap their hair round and round their head like a turban, and the mothers form a bun just north of their forehead the size of a grapefruit. Many of the women also wore a beautiful ethnic dress; the men of course, like most men in China, wore cheap suits and looked like any one of the other 800 million males.

The Li River, an aqueous thoroughfare running between Guilin to Yangshou, has a rich history of Cormorant fishing and while most of the big prize fish are long gone, many fisherman still use their trained birds to help them fish. The birds, hatched in captivity, spend their entire life with one fisherman and faithfully fish daily for their master. The fishermen set off after dark on their bamboo rafts with their cormorants wearing collars. After each dive from their small bamboo vessels, the birds return only to have the fisherman yank a fish from their throat - the birds unable to swallow because of the string around their neck. Every handful of dives however, the fisherman must reward his birds for their hard work with a small fishy treat - and if the fisherman fails to reward the bird, the aviary creatures go on strike and refuse to aid their owner.

Upon our arrival to Yangshou we were able to rent mountain bikes for a whopping 3 USD per day per person, bringing our transportation bill for four people and four days of fun to just shy of 48 USD. Our hostel sat five kilometers outside of Yangshou near a village named YiMa or 一马, meaning “one horse.” It seemed like a perfectly appropriate name for the village after considering its miniscule size and could be a perfect sister-city for Two Dot, Montana. Our hostel, called the Giggling Tree, was originally an old barn but had recently been purchased and massively repaired/remodeled by an extremely friendly Dutch couple. Because of the rural nature of our lodging, the night felt amazingly dark and for the first time in over six months we were able to enjoy a beautifully quiet starry night.

Our last day in Yangshou we decided that it was time to celebrate something… anything… and so we set off to find fireworks, China-style. After a bit of dickering I blew just shy of 30 USD on as much firepower as I could possibly tie into the rear rack of my bicycle. In the end, the purchase amounted to sixteen 3” shells that we sent hurtling into the crisp evening air outside of our hostel. Try it sometime and see how long it takes for somebody to complain or report to the police… in China they simply say, “Thank you. That was beautiful.”

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Photos

HaiBao the Fuzzy Blue Man
This guy is the mascot for 2010's biggest party ever

Shanghai alleyway
Gus, in particular, found the alleyways very interesting. Perhaps it is one of the few parts of Shanghai that existed 30 years ago.

Caves
The amazing cave that we visited outside of Guillin was made even more amazing with the wonderful lighting.

Streetfood!
Ross adventured into the streetfood world with Kelly...and enjoyed it.

Shopping Basket
Ross is just a little too tall for this shopping basket.

Snails
Snails
not quite the way they make them in France

Yao women performance
The hair the women are presenting, is the hair belonging to their ancestors.

Yao women preformance
Look at that long hair! Some womens' hair was longer than they were tall.

Yao woman
Note the knot of hair at the top of this womans' head; she is married with children.

Dragon's Backbone
Those who live in the mountains without roads don't want to carry up their bricks themselves. The donkeys play a vital role up here.

Dragon Terraces Stuffed Bamboo
At this restaurant in the rice terraces we ate rice and chicken roasted in bamboo. The cooks cut a hole in the top of the bamboo segment, stuffed in the food, cork the hole with a corn-cob. After roasting the bamboo over a fire, the servers bring the bamboo to the table, and break it in half at the table for us to dig in!

Comments

[Donna White]

Spectacular caves!
The caves outside of Guillin look spectacular! I'm so glad that Angus and Ross were able to come and visit and travel with you. It sounds like you all had a fabulous time!